We Need To Talk About Online Research Communities
Online communities have been the biggest research trend of the last ten years. More and more consultancies have expanded their businesses to include them, and an increasing number of clients now use them to unearth consumer insights. For consultancies they offer good margins, are easy to run, and are still a (relatively) new shiny product to sell to clients. For clients they are cheaper than traditional research techniques — e.g. focus groups, ethnographies and phone surveys — and appear to offer the reach of quant with the depth of qual. This, though, is an illusion.
Experienced consultants know that loud, opinionated respondents can skew the discussion in a focus group. And that in a one-to-one interview, consumers might just tell you what they think you want to hear. A good consultant will also know that the most valuable insights can be found not in what people say, but in how they say it, and in visual clues such as facial expressions and body language. MIT professor Sherry Turkle also observes that “[m]uch is learned from the tossed off aside, the comment made when the interview is ‘officially’ over.”
Skilled researchers talking face-to-face with consumers can pick up on these signals, ask the right probing questions, and read between the lines to understand how respondents really think, feel and act. But this is impossible when analysing what people thousands of miles away are writing in the chat-rooms of online communities. The medium just doesn’t offer the intimacy that is part and parcel of being in the same room as other human beings.
The gamification of online communities also leads people to act in ways that they wouldn’t in real life, and express opinions that they don’t actually hold. When cash bonuses and iPads are offered as incentives to take part in activities such as “Comment of the Month” and “Funniest Product-Related Photo”, respondents turn into a pack of Pavlov’s dogs, repeating the opinions and actions they’ve already seen rewarded on the community. Let’s not even start on the subject of professional respondents who simultaneously sign up to several communities and game each one’s fees and rewards.
This isn’t to say that digital platforms and social media are useless when working out what makes consumers tick. Such tools can help us in a variety of ways. They can tell us what people do in real time. They can show us how online groups form and dissolve. They can educate us about how customers interact with brands and products via digital devices.
But they don’t offer the same richness as talking to someone in person. Or reveal the non-verbal clues that might show how a consumer really feels about a product, brand or service. Or allow savvy researchers to delve into the meaning of a respondent’s “tossed off aside”.
Each research method has pros and cons. Focus groups, interviews and ethnographies put us in the same room as consumers, but only allow us to connect with a small number of people at a time. Conversely, online communities can involve hundreds of respondents, but fail to provide the same deep insights as face-to-face conversations.
Plus, all we really learn from each method is how consumers think, feel and act when asked about their lives in that particular context, be it a focus group, a one-to-one interview, or an online chat-room. To unearth the rich layers of overlapping insight that will better solve our clients’ problems, we need to combine approaches in a way that suits each project. In short, we need to ask people how they behave in as many different ways as possible.
Online research communities are just one way of asking these questions and understanding customer behaviour, but it should never be the only game in town.
